1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of computer processing and, more particularly, to the processing of electronic documents including archival operations.
2. Description of the Related Art
As computer memory storage and data bandwidth increase, so does the amount and complexity of data that business and industry daily manage. A large portion of the data involves corporate information managed for a company or workgroup by one or more servers. These hardware and software components of these servers provide employees and customers the ability to search and access the corporate information such as electronic documents, email messages, announcements, tasks, discussion topics, and so forth. A dedicated server, such as an electronic document server, manages electronic documents for an office by managing and storing both intra-office and external document transmissions. The electronic document server may provide each user of the system with one or more folders and subfolders for storing electronic documents. For example, an email message may be stored within an email folder on an email server.
Electronic documents, such as emails, may contain crucial information to a business, and therefore, may be archived, or backed up, to an archival storage system. The archival storage system may prevent loss or corruption of data included in the electronic documents. Archiving applications may be faced with the task of efficiently archiving hundreds of thousands of email messages every day. The number of users receiving email and the number of messages received daily by each user may be appreciable. In order not to overload a computer network during normal business hours, an IT administrator may configure the archival system to archive overnight on a daily or weekly basis.
The large amount of data contained within an email server may make efficient archiving difficult as the archival operations are constrained by time and bandwidth limitations. For example, an archival operation may be expected to complete within two hours each night. Thus, a certain amount of data may not be archived. Some archiving applications provide a static filtering method for determining whether an email message is to be archived. Based on a filtering decision, an email message may be ignored or designated for archival. A static filtering method is characterized by a predefined collection of rules, which does not change over time, being applied to the email messages. For example, a static filter may filter all email messages, or emails, sent from a particular sender. The resulting emails selected for archiving are not prioritized. More important emails may wait behind a large number of relatively unimportant emails during such an archiving process. This large number of unimportant emails may delay, or even block, the archiving of important emails.
In view of the above, improved systems and methods for the processing of electronic documents including archival operations are desired.